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Friday, 6 June 2014

Public Harm England

In this country, the United Kingdom, we have new department created
by our Government - the one that promised to prune out lobby groups and
sock puppets! The Department of Health (which we had before) is now
advised by Public Health England. It is an executive agency.

In
January 2014 it launched a new offensive on smoking called "Smokefree
Health Harms" on television and on billboards across England. These
consisted of what I consider criminal nocebos designed to shock and
offend. When I complained about the terrible images that British people
were forced to take into their subconscious minds by having to look at
massive billboards of pools of blood and black tar and TV adverts of
black blood circulating in peoples' brains I got a reply from "The
Department of Health"

Quote "We received a number of complaints about
these ads which included irresponsibility and offence, harm to children
and those with haemophobia and concerns about appropriate scheduling and
misleadingness.

While we acknowledged that the imagery in the
poster ad that showed a pool of blood and tar would be difficult for
some passers-by, the anti-smoking context was clear. Although we
sympathised with any children who had found the ad disturbing and
acknowledged the concern of those with blood-related phobias, the ad was
deliberately hard-hitting to raise awareness about the serious health
consequences of smoking. In this context, the image was unlikely to be
seen as irresponsible by appearing in an untargeted medium.

We concluded that the ads were unlikely to cause excessive distress, or serious or widespread offence." End quote

"Smokefree"
is an ideology, a lobby, a group of anti smokers now promoted by The
Department of Health's new executive body Public Health England.
Politically, this is terrifying because any lobby group might be able to
push their agendas - anti meat, anti fat, anti alcohol, anti salt, anti
whatever with equally dubious scientific evidence to support them.

The
adverts Public Health England produced, paid for by the Government, are
visually and scientifically incorrect. "Tar" is not black - smoker's
lungs are not black. The "tar" in cigarettes has no colour. It is a
chemical - not black tar as we imagine it to be. This is a kind of lie
promoted by Tobacco Control. And the mental abuse on viewers of such
contaminated images are unimportant to Public Health. "We concluded that
the ads were unlikely to cause excessive distress, or serious or
widespread offence."

This is not Public health, but Public Harm.

Soon they will be concluding that eating fat makes people fat. Or eating salt give us high blood pressure, or that vaping normalises smoking!